Is Jesus real?

Was He truly the Son of God, or was He simply delusional?

Did His followers invent the resurrection?

Why did Jesus have to die for our sins?

And if God is loving, why does He allow people to suffer, even when they have prayed faithfully and trusted Him completely?

These are not small questions. They are questions people have wrestled with for generations, and I don’t believe God is threatened or offended by them.

C. S. Lewis once wrote:

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

That’s stayed with me because if Christianity is true, it changes everything.

Who Jesus is cannot simply be an interesting idea we occasionally think about. If He really lived, died and rose again, then it affects how we understand God, suffering, forgiveness, death and the way we live our lives.

I’m not writing this as a theologian or historian. I’m certainly not writing it because I believe I have every answer.

I’m writing as someone whose faith has been tested by fear, illness, uncertainty and life-changing loss.

I’m writing for the person who is curious about Jesus, the person who thinks Christianity might all be a hoax, and the person who once believed but has been hurt so deeply that they no longer know how to trust God.

I’m not trying to win an argument.

I simply want to share why everything I have walked through has deepened and strengthened my belief in Him.

This post is longer than most of the others I’ve written. That’s because these questions deserve more than a simple answer.

I wanted to explore them honestly and carefully – not to cover every possible argument, but to make room for some of the questions people may carry about Jesus, Christianity and suffering.

Who Was Jesus?

The existence of Jesus is not seriously disputed by the vast majority of historians. Scholars may disagree about His identity, His miracles and the resurrection, but there is broad agreement that Jesus of Nazareth lived and was crucified under Roman authority.

The real question is not usually whether Jesus existed, but who He was and what happened after His death.

Was He merely a teacher?

Was He delusional?

Or was He truly who He claimed to be?

Even Pilate, the Roman governor who questioned Jesus before His crucifixion, repeatedly said that he could find no basis for a charge against Him.

Pilate was not one of Jesus’ followers and had no personal reason to defend Him. His conclusion doesn’t prove every claim Jesus made, but I find it significant that the man responsible for judging His case did not find Him guilty of the accusations brought against Him.

Matthew records that when Pilate realised the crowd would not be persuaded, he washed his hands in front of them and declared himself innocent of Jesus’ blood.

Yet washing his hands did not remove his responsibility. He still chose to hand an innocent man over to be crucified because protecting his own position and satisfying the crowd became more important than doing what he knew was right.

Pilate asked, “What is truth?” while the One who called Himself the truth stood directly in front of him. He could not find grounds to condemn Jesus, yet he still chose what was politically easier.

But Jesus’ innocence alone is not what Christianity rests upon.

The Christian faith rests on the resurrection.

Even the apostle Paul acknowledged that if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, Christian faith would be empty.

The earliest Christian testimony records that Jesus died, was buried, rose again and appeared to His followers – to individuals as well as groups. These claims weren’t quietly added centuries later. They were being proclaimed within the earliest Christian communities while people connected to those events were still alive.

Could the disciples have invented it?

The book of Acts shows us that the earliest followers of Jesus continued proclaiming His resurrection even when it brought arrest, imprisonment, beatings, persecution and death.

James, the brother of John, was killed. Peter was imprisoned and faced the threat of execution. Stephen was stoned, and Paul was beaten, imprisoned and even left for dead.

Yet they continued.

Their suffering doesn’t, by itself, prove that the resurrection happened. People throughout history have suffered and died for beliefs that weren’t true.

But there is an important difference between dying for something you have simply been taught and being willing to suffer for something you personally claimed to have witnessed.

The disciples weren’t gaining wealth, comfort or power from their message. Following Jesus cost them deeply, yet they continued to proclaim that they had seen Him alive after His crucifixion.

That doesn’t force anyone to accept their testimony.

But it does make it difficult for me to believe that they knowingly created a hoax and then continued carrying that lie when abandoning it could have spared them so much suffering.

Perhaps someone might say they were mistaken or overwhelmed by grief. That possibility deserves to be considered honestly too.

But for me, a simple explanation of delusion does not fully account for what followed – the transformation of frightened followers into public witnesses, the early reports of appearances to both individuals and groups, and people such as Paul, who had actively opposed the Christian movement before becoming one of its most committed messengers.

I cannot place the resurrection under a microscope or prove it like a mathematical equation.

Faith will always involve trust.

But I also do not believe Christian faith requires me to switch off my mind. When I look at the life of Jesus, the claims of the earliest witnesses, the transformation of His followers and what they were willing to endure, I cannot dismiss Him as a hoax.

God is still gently teaching me lessons.

Our small group is currently completing the Blueprint course alongside others from our church. Recently, we were learning about apologetics – the practice of exploring and explaining the reasons behind Christian belief.

Conveniently, many of the subjects we covered were the exact questions I had spent so much time researching for this post.

While writing, I’d gone back through the Bible, looked at the historical evidence, and carefully checked what could honestly be said about the earliest accounts and the lives and deaths of the disciples.

I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t overstating anything simply because I wanted it to support what I believed.

Yet not once had it occurred to me that someone might ask, “Why do you believe Jesus is God?”

To me, that belief felt so foundational that my immediate thought was simply, Of course He is.

Yet for someone who doesn’t believe, or someone genuinely wrestling with faith, that may be the very first question they ask.

Before the significance of the resurrection, the cross or anything else Christians believe about Jesus can make sense, they first need to understand why Christians believe He was more than a teacher or prophet.

Our pastor then suggested a “fun” role play in which he would ask questions that someone who did not believe – or someone genuinely wrestling with faith – might ask.

He then randomly selected three people to answer them.

Naturally, I began praying that my name wouldn’t be called.

Public speaking – or really any attention being placed on me – absolutely petrifies me. But another part of me was thinking, You’ll be fine. You’ve just written an entire post about this. You know this.

My name was the last one called.

As I walked to the front, I was nervous, but also quietly confident that I could handle whatever question came my way.

Then he asked something along the lines of:

“Christians believe that Jesus is God. Where does the Bible say that? Did Jesus ever claim to be God, and what did He do that showed He was God?”

By the time he had finished asking, I was already sweating.

I knew I believed the answer. I’d even read about it before. But in that moment, I could not gather all the thoughts in my head and turn them into a clear response.

All I managed to say was that Jesus forgave sins and only God has the authority to forgive sin, and that He said He was the way. I’m fairly sure I repeated that last part more than once while my brain desperately searched for anything else to add.

The fuller answer, of course, returned to me as soon as I sat down.

Jesus did things that belonged to God alone: He forgave sins, accepted worship and spoke of Himself as existing before Abraham. He said, “I and the Father are one,” and when Thomas called Him, “My Lord and my God,” Jesus did not correct him.

Christians don’t believe Jesus is God because of the resurrection alone; His resurrection confirmed everything He had already revealed through His words, authority, miracles and life.

Together, His life, death and resurrection reveal someone far greater than simply a teacher or prophet.

I could almost imagine Jesus gently smiling at my discomfort.

I don’t know whether God gave me that particular question to humble me, but He certainly used the moment to teach me something important: speaking about my faith is not about having every answer.

There was a time when I was frightened to speak to people about my faith because I worried that I might say the wrong thing or be asked a question I couldn’t answer.

I still don’t have every answer, and I never will. But I’m learning that I don’t need to know everything before I can have an honest conversation about Jesus.

I would never want to force my faith on anyone. Belief cannot be pressured into someone. But I also don’t want fear to make me shy away from the questions people genuinely want to ask.

Sometimes I may be able to explain why I believe. Other times, the most honest answer may simply be, “I don’t know – but we can explore it together.”

This is not about proving how much I know or making myself look capable.

Everything I learn and everything I write should point towards Him.

I still have a long way to go.

There will always be more to learn, more room to grow and more ways for God to gently remind me: Keep going – but remain humble.

Why the Cross?

Then there is the question of the cross.

Why would Jesus need to die for our sins?

Sin can sound like a religious word used only to describe a list of things people shouldn’t do. But sin is much deeper than that.

It’s everything within humanity that separates us from God and from one another – our pride, selfishness, cruelty, dishonesty, injustice and desire to live as though we don’t need Him.

We see its consequences throughout the world, but if I’m honest, I also see it within myself.

Christianity teaches that we couldn’t repair that separation by simply trying harder to become good people. So, God didn’t wait at a distance for us to find our own way back to Him.

He came towards us.

Jesus didn’t have His life unwillingly taken from Him. He chose the cross. He entered our brokenness, carried the weight of sin and made a way for us to be reconciled to God.

Romans 5:8 tells us that God demonstrated His love for us through Christ’s death while we were still sinners.

He didn’t wait for us to become deserving of that love.

That is what the cross tells me about God.

It tells me that God’s love is not distant or passive. It moves towards us, even at an unimaginable cost.

It also tells me that God doesn’t observe human suffering from somewhere safe and untouched.

In Jesus, He entered it.

Jesus experienced rejection, betrayal, grief, physical agony and death.

The Heart of a Christian

I also understand that, for some people, the greatest barrier to Christianity hasn’t been Jesus Himself.

It has been the way they have been treated by people who claimed to follow Him.

Christians can sometimes be seen as judgemental, condemning or more interested in pointing out what someone has done wrong than in understanding what they are carrying.

Sadly, there are times when that criticism is deserved.

But when I look at Jesus, that is not the heart I see.

Jesus didn’t wait for people to fix every part of their lives before He moved towards them. He welcomed people whom others rejected. He sat with those who had been judged, excluded and pushed aside.

He saw their choices, their pain and their brokenness, but He also saw their humanity.

And He loved them.

To me, the heart of a Christian should reflect that same grace.

It’s the pastor who begins a sermon by saying, “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe – you are welcome here.”

It’s the person who sees someone in crisis and doesn’t first ask whether their circumstances were caused by their own decisions.

They simply see someone who is hurting and ask, “How can I help?”

It is choosing compassion before criticism.

It is remembering that none of us stands before God because we have earned our place there.

This doesn’t mean pretending that every decision is healthy or that right and wrong don’t matter. It doesn’t mean Christians will never disagree with someone.

It means recognising that we’re not called to approach people with self-righteousness or condemnation.

We can hold onto what we believe while still treating every person with dignity, gentleness and compassion.

Christians aren’t people who have reached perfection.

We’re people who need grace too.

I’m certainly not claiming that I live this out perfectly. I know I’m nowhere near that level, and there will always be ways in which I need to grow.

But I feel incredibly blessed to belong to a church that seeks to embody this kind of faith – a church where people are welcomed as they are, where those who are hurting are cared for, and where grace is not only spoken about but shown.

That is the Christianity I have experienced.

Not a faith that says, “Become perfect, and then you may belong.”

But one that says, “You are welcome here. Come as you are, meet Jesus and allow Him to work in your life.”

Where Is God in Suffering?

But even when we experience that kind of love and community, one of the most difficult questions remains.

If God loves us, why does He allow suffering?

Why does someone get cancer?

Why does a child die while their family is praying desperately for healing?

Why are some prayers followed by the answer we hoped for while other people, who prayed with just as much faith, are left grieving?

I don’t have an answer that could ever make the loss of a child, or someone deeply loved feel acceptable.

I would never want to offer someone a neat explanation for pain.

I believe God answered many prayers throughout my cancer treatment and surgery.

I believe He carried me, protected me and placed the right people around me.

I’m now in remission, and I thank Him for every clear scan and every day I have been given.

But I never want my testimony to suggest that my prayers were answered because I had more faith.

I did not earn my healing.

I was not more deserving.

God does not love me more than He loves the person whose cancer returned, or the parent who prayed faithfully and still had to bury their child.

Their story is not evidence that they failed to believe strongly enough, prayed the wrong words or somehow didn’t trust God properly.

Faith is not a formula in which enough prayer guarantees the outcome we want.

Sometimes people say there is no such thing as an unanswered prayer – that God always answers and sometimes the answer is no.

I understand the heart behind that. I don’t believe God ignores us or fails to hear us.

But I also think that statement can sound much simpler than prayer feels when you are the one still standing in the middle of the storm.

Sometimes we don’t know whether God’s answer is no, not yet, different from what we expected, or something we may never understand in this life.

Sometimes all we know is that we have prayed, waited and hoped, and nothing appears to have changed.

It’s often easier to recognise an answer once we’re standing on the other side.

Hindsight can make faith sound far tidier than it felt while we were living through it.

My mum and I spoke about this recently.

She believes there is no such thing as an unanswered prayer because God always answers, even when His answer is no.

But when she was first told that I would need two permanent ostomies, she asked God why.

She trusted Him, but she was also a mother watching her daughter face something life changing.

In that moment, she couldn’t yet see how I would recover, adjust or eventually come to view my ostomies as part of the life that had been saved.

Her question didn’t mean she lacked faith.

It meant she was hurting.

Now that we’re on this side of the storm, it’s easier to look back and recognise how God carried us.

But while we were inside it, we didn’t know how the story would unfold.

I don’t believe God was offended when she asked why.

Scripture is filled with people who trusted God and still asked, “How long, Lord?”

They grieved, questioned, lamented and pleaded with Him.

Even Jesus, knowing what lay ahead, was deeply distressed in Gethsemane and asked whether the cup of suffering could be taken from Him before surrendering to the Father’s will.

Trust and pain can exist together.
Faith and questions can exist together.

Surrender doesn’t mean we’re no longer allowed to ask God to change our circumstances.

Sometimes faith sounds like confident praise.

Sometimes it sounds like, “God, I trust You, but I do not understand.”

And sometimes it’s simply continuing to turn towards Him when we have no words left.

Christianity doesn’t give me a tidy explanation for every tragedy.

It teaches me that the world is not as God originally intended it to be and that sin, death, disease and human choices have brought deep brokenness into creation.

But I know that still leaves the question: if God is powerful, why does He not always intervene?

I can’t fully answer that.

I don’t believe every tragedy is something God directly caused.

I also don’t believe we need to call suffering good in order to believe that God can bring something good from it.

Cancer was not good.

Losing parts of my body was not good.

Watching the people I love experience fear and pain was not good.

But God met me there.

He was present through the prayers, the people, the medical team, the worship songs, the Scripture that arrived at exactly the right time and the strength I know I didn’t have on my own.

The cross does not show me a God who remained removed from suffering.

It shows me a God who entered it.

And the resurrection tells me that suffering and death will not have the final word.

I have learned that the absence of an explanation is not the same as the absence of God.

Why I Still Believe

My cancer is currently in remission, but I know it could return.

Of course, I pray that it never does.

I pray for many more clear scans and many more years of life.

But my trust in God cannot depend only on continuing to receive the outcome I want.

I would never pretend that a recurrence wouldn’t frighten me.

I’m sure I would cry.

I would have questions.

I might ask God why.

Faith doesn’t mean I would feel no fear or sadness.

It means that, even within that fear, I would know the God who carried me the first time.

If my cancer returned, He would still be God.

He would still be good.

He would still be faithful.

And I would continue to trust Him.

Not because cancer is good.

Not because the pain wouldn’t matter.

And not because I would suddenly understand why it was happening.

I would trust Him because He has already shown me that I will never have to walk through suffering alone.

My testimony is not that God has promised me a life without pain.
It is that He has never left me in it.

So why do I still believe?

The truth is, I don’t believe despite everything I have been through.

My belief is stronger because of what I have been through.

I have seen God’s goodness in the darkest season of my life.

I have felt His presence when the future was completely unknown.

I have watched Him bring hope into places I thought would always be defined by fear and loss.

I still have questions.

There are things I may never understand on this side of eternity.

But when I look at Jesus – His life, His love, the cross, the resurrection and the way He has met me in my own suffering – I believe He is worthy of my trust.

For anyone wrestling with God, I don’t think you need to pretend that your questions aren’t there.

Bring them to Him.

Ask Him why.

Tell Him you are angry, uncertain or afraid.

And perhaps begin with the smallest and most honest prayer you can offer:

“God, I don’t know what I believe. But if You are real, help me to know who Jesus is.”

Because C. S. Lewis was right.

If it is all false, it is of no importance.

But if it is true, it means everything.

It is worth asking the questions.